President Trump, Russia, White House meetings and questions of executive power were all front and center at James B. Comey’s hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

But another theme also emerged: Mr. Comey’s interplay with the news media.

With startling candor, Mr. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, described how he engineered the leak of his own memo, which detailed a private conversation with Mr. Trump. He also challenged a report about Russia that ran in The New York Times.

And in one memorable moment, he compared a throng of reporters gathered at his driveway to “sea gulls at the beach,” prompting laughter in the chamber.

Mr. Comey’s acknowledgment of his role as a leaker, although just one of several revelations that emerged from the testimony, dominated the early news coverage of his testimony, with The Washington Post calling it a “remarkable admission” and Bret Baier, the Fox News anchor, declaring “the media” as one of the losers of the day.

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Mr. Comey testified that he hoped that the information would lead to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump-friendly news organizations seized on the detail, wielding it as a cudgel against Mr. Comey and focusing on his leaking while playing down other developments from the hearing, like his assertions that the president had lied. Breitbart News described Mr. Comey as “implicating himself as an anti-Trump leaker” and a red headline on its home page screamed “Shock: Fmr FBI Director Admits Orchestrating Leak.”

The right was not alone in focusing on the acknowledgment. Shortly after the hearing ended, The Huffington Post ran with the lead headline “Comey: I Leaked to Get a Special Prosecutor.”

In his rebuttal to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, attacked Mr. Comey’s admission as a betrayal of his official duties and a sign of his intent to embarrass the president. Mr. Comey, in his testimony, noted that the memo was not classified and that he was no longer a government employee when he leaked it.

It is highly unusual in Washington circles for powerful officials to admit to being the source of a leak. But the reality, veteran journalists say, is that such leaks are a day-to-day occurrence — perhaps even more so during the Trump administration, as revelatory details about the White House have led to a series of blockbuster stories over the last several months.

In blunt, almost matter-of-fact fashion, Mr. Comey described how he had written a memo about a one-on-one meeting with the president and given it to a friend, a professor at Columbia Law School, with the express purpose of having it passed on to a journalist. The Times reported on the memo last month.

The Times also drew scrutiny as a result of another of Mr. Comey’s statements: He challenged the veracity of an article that described links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian intelligence.

“In the main, it was not true,” Mr. Comey said of the article, but he did not specify what he thought was wrong with it. In a statement, a spokeswoman for The Times said the paper had “found no evidence that any prior reporting was inaccurate.” The Times published an article on Thursday discussing its reporting.

News organizations friendly to Mr. Trump, who often attacks The Times, found fresh material in Mr. Comey’s assertion.

Breitbart News, in its reporting on the comment, evoked a frequent presidential phrase: “fake news.”

Mr. Comey’s testimony was carried live on numerous broadcast and cable networks, and anchors on multiple networks expressed their astonishment at the political developments on Thursday. On NBC, Savannah Guthrie described the remarkable scene of a former F.B.I. director “calling the sitting president a liar, on more than one occasion.” Chuck Todd said that leading Democrats were “looking for a smoking gun and didn’t get it.”

Many commentators noted that Mr. Comey had stopped short of accusing the president of obstructing justice. Fox News’s anchors, immediately after the testimony, offered a mixed analysis. Dana Perino, a former aide to President George W. Bush, said, “If the Democrats were going to be thinking this is going to be a home run for them today, they got a surprise.”

“If I were Donald Trump’s lawyer, I would be pretty happy,” Mr. Wallace said on-air. But he added, “Politically, I thought it was very damaging to the president,” and noted that Mr. Comey had explicitly called the president a liar.

“It’s not good stuff to have been said on national television,” Mr. Wallace said.

Observers of the news media kept close track of the headlines, known in the television news industry as chyrons, that flash onscreen as a kind of instant analysis of the hearing. When Mr. Comey concluded his public remarks, around 12:30 p.m., the final chyrons encapsulated a familiar divide.